HISTORY: Eunan O'Halpin's new book publishes MI5's own official account of its Irish activities, together with an introductory background and annotations, writes Garret FitzGerald.
MI5 and Ireland 1939-1945: The Official History. Edited and Introduced by Eunan O Halpin. Irish Academic Press, 130pp. €24.50
It records that, on August 31st, 1938, Joe Walshe, Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, was sent by de Valera to seek British help in setting up a counter-espionage department in the Army, which would exchange information with MI5 on the activities of Germans on Ireland.
The consequent establishment of what came to be known within the Army as G2 initiated a period of very close secret co-operation with Britain, which de Valera maintained throughout the War, parallel with his public commitment to neutrality during that conflict.
There was, it is true, a period after the fall of France in June 1940 when fears of an Allied defeat may have temporarily influenced the attitudes and actions of de Valera and some of his officials. Thus, in early July 1940, de Valera decided to reject a British offer to approach the Northern Ireland government to join in steps to create a united Ireland in return for Irish entry into the War and/or the location of British troops in Ireland in advance of a German invasion.
That decision on partition may have been influenced by the view of Walshe around that time, which he incorporated in a memo to his Taoiseach - also his Minister - in which he somewhat prematurely asserted that "Britain has been conquered". Walshe went on to say that, if Ireland were at that stage to enter the war on the Allied side, this would provoke "the deservedly complete loss of our independence" at the hands of the victorious Nazis. "Deservedly" for having been so stupid as to have entered the War on the losing side!
But even at that moment of doubt, de Valera took the risk of intensifying the secret co-operation with Britain that he had initiated after the signing of the April 1938 Anglo-Irish Agreement. It was in fact through what the official MI5 account describes as the "friendly and unofficial channel for co-operation" with G2 that arrangements were made at that point to send a British Military Mission to Dublin. We know from other sources that this mission secured an agreement that, in the event of a German invasion, British forces in Northern Ireland would move south and join with the Irish Amy, under British command, to attempt to repel such an attack.
This MI5 account also confirms that, after a reported threat by the Irish Government in January 1942 to break diplomatic relations with Germany unless they ceased using their wireless transmitter, it was not again used until it was confiscated at the end of 1943. Moreover, MI5 did not support attempts at a higher level in Britain, and by the US Government, to persuade the Irish Government to close the German Legation in Dublin, whose activities were being closely monitored - for they believed that such a closure might only have led to its substitution by some other, less vulnerable, secret German presence.
This MI5 account of its Irish activities makes it clear it feared that, if the activities of any of the other British intelligence services operating in Ireland (there seem to have been no less than five of them, of which the principal one was, of course, the SIS, or MI6 under the British Passport Officer in Dublin, Capt Collinson) were discovered by the Irish authorities, the close co-operation between MI5 and G2 would be ended.
But G2 was, of course, aware of, and in fact not too concerned about these activities, because it had infiltrated Capt Collinson's operation!
Partly because of their role in the establishment of G2 - but also because MI5 seemed to have failed to realise the significance of the fact that, just 20 years earlier, its successive heads, Liam Archer and Dan Bryan, had been part of Michael Collins's extraordinarily successful intelligence operation against the British - British counter-intelligence consistently under-estimated the Irish intelligence operation. (In Portugal also, the British were unaware that their secret activities were known to the Portuguese.)
It is, moreover, interesting that the British seem to have been unaware that, from 1942 onwards, G2 was also co-operating closely with the American Office of Strategic Services!
Furthermore, this MI5 account also indicates that the British were naively inclined to believe much of the co-operation offered by G2 was undertaken behind de Valera's back - whereas they should, of course, have realised that, as communications between the two agencies passed through de Valera's own Department of Foreign Affairs, headed by Joe Walshe, nothing was done of which de Valera would not have approved.
In clarifying issues such as these, Eunan O'Halpin's introduction and notes are invaluable. We are all greatly indebted to his work on some of the more mysterious aspects of Irish history in the 20th century, not only in unearthing documentary material but also in having interviewed many participants before their death in the later years of that period, through which he gained unique insight into aspects of our history that might otherwise have been permanently lost.
Mark Hull's Irish Secrets complements O'Halpin's work in a remarkable way. Some of the facts about German wartime espionage in Ireland have been known since Enno Stephan published his Spies In Ireland almost 40 years ago. But during the intervening decades, much archive material has become accessible, and has been put to remarkable use by Hull in this very comprehensive account of German activities in Ireland before and during the War.
A notable feature of the book is that it reveals the names of many Irish people who, often but not always because of their IRA connections, were involved in assisting German spies in Ireland, or in otherwise plotting with the Germans. The scale and complexity of these activities certainly made more difficult de Valera's task of combining a public stance of neutrality with secret close co-operation with Britain - in fulfilment of his commitment from as early as 1920 to ensure that an independent Ireland would never become a danger to Britain's security.
In retrospect, one of the most striking features of this wartime co-operation with Britain was that the Germans never seem to have found out what was going on. Had they done so, they would certainly have put more pressure on the Irish Government to act neutrally.
How is it that, in a country where it has always been difficult to keep anything entirely secret, the German Minister seems to have known nothing of the 14 different forms of Irish secret co-operation with Britain that were reported to the British Cabinet by Lord Cranborne in February 1945? Or, is it possible that he did know something of what was going on, but did not report on it to Berlin?
This book contrasts the skill and success of MI5 and G2, both separately and in conjunction with each other, with the incompetence of the Germans - who also suffered more from inter-agency rivalry than did the British. (In Ireland G2 and the Special Branch of the Garda worked harmoniously and successfully together.)
The German agents sent to Ireland were, at best, of mediocre quality, and some were downright stupid. After landing here, one asked a Garda how to contact the IRA, and another went to a police station for directions to the house where Francis Stuart's wife Iseult lived - an IRA contact. And their briefing before coming and identity cover was poor.
Dr Richard Hayes, director of the National Library, not only was a brilliant cryptographer - greatly admired by MI5 - but he also interrogated German agents after their capture, used chemicals to reveal a secret message sent by Hermann Görtz from his cell in Athlone, and in another case was able to show that an apparently authentic identity document found on a spy was partly forged. (In his spare time he also ran the library!)
Incidentally, not only was Hayes's opposite number at the National Museum, Dr Adolf Mahr, (who was in Germany when the war broke out and was unable to return here) the head of the Nazi Party in Ireland, but we also learnt at the launch of these two books in the National Library that the director of the National Gallery during the war was a British agent!
Garret FitzGerald is a former Taoiseach. His most recent book, Reflections on the Irish State, was published in October